Many product development efforts have a knowledge gap between the users and the developers. Someone in marketing or management is the one who knows what the product should do. This person helps the Product Owner write up a backlog of features and user experience. The developers then see a list of features that they are supposed to build but have little knowledge of the why the features are important nor who wants them. This can leave the developers on a "feature tread-mill." building software the best they can will no connection to the beneficiaries of their work. This disconnect can effect both the quality of the end product and the satisfaction of the team building it, let alone creating a flat user experience.

This session will introduce the concepts and use of personas and empathy maps. While developers probably don't want to be marketing or customer specialists, these tools allow developers to understand their end users better. And the Product Owner and people defining the backlog of features will have a shared vocabulary with the developers about the end users. Personas and empathy maps efficiently fill the gap of knowledge and lead to software that better fits the user's needs.

Participants will learn personas and empathy maps by creating usable artifacts for a software product. Participants are invited to bring your own real product, user information and take back a valuable tool to the office on Monday!